I spent much of Boxing Day reading, perhaps a little belatedly, Joris Luyendijk’s Swimming with Sharks: My journey into the world of the bankers. It’s a book that has featured on one or two lists of books of the year. The book is based on around 200 interviews conducting between 2011-2013 […]
Over the weekend the CIH and the Resolution Foundation released a useful briefing called More than a roof. The focus is largely on the way in which financial incentives could be used to improve standards in the private rented sector. The briefing provides a brief overview of the […]
On Thursday Noah put up a brief post on the Market Priesthood. It relates the story of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics fame, meeting David Cameron, of Coalition Government fame. Levitt and Dubner tried to persuade Cameron that health care was just like any other part […]
The Ministry of Justice consultation Transforming Legal Aid closes today. At the last minute I decided to submit something reflecting on the economics of the proposals. You can find the substance of what I wrote on my page at Scribd.com. It can be accessed below the fold.
Making work pay. Few sensible people would object to this as a policy aspiration. It’s at the core of the Coalition Government’s justification for its reforms to the social security system. So that’s got to be good. The cracks begin to appear when we move on to consider […]
The Work Programme (WP) is the Coalition Government’s £5bn replacement for the range of programmes – including the Flexible New Deal – designed to assist unemployed people back into work. While the WP learns from and builds upon previous initiatives it also represents a departure. Its key characteristic […]
So it appears that the Department of Work and Pensions may not have been entirely correct. The Department initially denied that Jobcentre Plus employees were tricking vulnerable people in order to sanction them and stop their benefits, as reported in the Guardian last weekend. The Guardian yesterday continued […]
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